Unified communications (UC) is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (IM), presence information, Internet Protocol (IP) telephony, video conferencing, call control, and speech control with non real-time communication services such as integrated voicemail, email, Short-Message Service (SMS), fax, and so forth. Additionally, unified communications enables an individual to send a message on one medium and receive on another.
Recordings of real-time communications such as teleconferences or calls are usually available for an entire call or conference. Likewise, records of non real-time communications such as email are stored electronically and are readily accessible, at least until those records are archived or deleted from a file server. Some telecommunications products in the prior art feature the use of time codes within a real-time recording, in order to access particular portions of the conference or call. Each time code is a more-or-less-arbitrarily-chosen reference value that enables the temporal correlation of one type of media associated with the recording, such as images, with another type of media associated with the recording, such as audio. The time code might be represented, for example, in an hour: minute:second.frame format.
Products also exist that feature synchronized operations on multiple media streams using the time codes. Other products are capable of adding time codes or other pointers such as keyword recognition of a speech-to-text transcript of the audio stream.